OSCON talk proposals

The deadline for proposing ideas for OSCON talks was Monday at 11:59 p.m. Naturally I clicked Submit for the final time not long before then, at 11:56 p.m. Note I said “final time,” implying more than one—I decided to go all-out and submit three ideas, in hopes that at least one will slip through. For the curious, they are

Design and publish beautifully and professionally: How to create a professional-looking document, using Scribus and Inkscape. Many people who read this probably don’t realize I spent four years working as a page designer and copy editor at newspapers. I continue that interest today as editor of a newsletter about open-source activity for the Open Source Educational Laboratory at Oregon State.

Community dynamics in a large open-source project: Problems, solutions and conundrums in Gentoo. The funniest (and saddest) part is when the same things begin to repeat themselves, and nobody else remembers last time it happened.

Open-source software in the biosciences: Where we are and what we learned on the voyage: The cruel joke of scientists as programmers. As a grad student in biochemistry at OSU, I’ve had to deal with more ugly software than many of you can imagine. But at least more of it is open source now, right?